


The handmaiden who said no

by Perspicacia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Sabé and Obi-wan raise the twins, Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-29 21:49:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8506798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perspicacia/pseuds/Perspicacia
Summary: At the beginning, there was PadmeandSabe, the little cousins only their parents could differentiate, mischievous little brunettes with too many terrible ideas.Padme became queen, and Sabé became decoy, bodyguard, and sometimes spy. Panaka didn’t train fools, and Sabé was the brightest of his pupils.But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to convince her cousin to divorce Anakin quietly, and quickly, and it wasn’t enough to help her save Padme, when the husband she didn’t want to renounce murdered her.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AngelQueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelQueen/gifts).



> Jedicuties on tumblr was the most patient beta that ever was and wonderful with my strange ideas about english grammar.

In the first year of the lifelong journey that Sabé would undertake with Obi-Wan Kenobi, the word she would use the most was “NO!!”. The sentence she would use the most was “Are you kidding me?” with the close second: “What were they teaching you in this temple of yours?”.

This close second would become non-existent after a year; she grew to know him well enough to care about the pain he was hiding when the Temple and his lost brothers and sisters were mentioned.

Or perhaps her anger for Padme had started to ease. Only a little, but enough to not hurt the closest thing Padme’s murderer had had for father on purpose.

But to start with that would deprive us of the beginning.

At the beginning, there was _PadmeandSabe_ , the little cousins only their parents could differentiate, mischievous little brunettes with too many terrible ideas. Padme wanted to help those who did wrong to do better; and Sabé wanted to punish them, or more importantly to stop them from hurting Padme, never cautious in her quests.

Sabé was ten Naboo months older, those things counted when you were so young your knees were scraped daily.

But time passes. Time passes and Sabé couldn’t protect her cousin from aspiring to create a better world. From wanting to be a force in this change.

Padme became queen, and Sabé became decoy, bodyguard, and sometimes spy. Panaka didn’t train fools, and Sabé was the brightest of his pupils.

“One day, you will replace me.” He would say with a smile, to lessen the blow when Sabé failed a training exercise. “Now, do it again. And again.”

“I’m not sure I want to train future handmaidens. I don’t want your job: you look teen years older than you are” Sabé would protest. “I only do it to protect Padmé.”

“You have a talent that is so much more than being physically close to the queen and quick with a blaster. But we really need to work on this lack of tact though. Most of the time, you won’t obtain a lot of information from people if you tell them they’re a decrepit old relic.”

Cordé learned hacking and piloting, Dormé learned piloting and mechanic, Saché learned gathering of information and disguise, Yané learned cryptography and sabotage of subspaces transmissions, Eirtae learned five languages, Rabé learned antidotes and poisons and narcotics, and Padme learned galactic law and history…

They all learned combat, with blasters and hands to hands. Rabé learned Telruoc cane combat from a Rodian master, Eirtae learned Nosiol, knife combat technique native to Utapau, Yané learned the spinning kicks that were characteristic of Hapes’ warriors, and Padme learned the joint manipulations designed to disarm and stop an attacker that were born on Naboo ~~,~~ in the beginning of the colonization, before peace.

And Sabé? Sabé learned everything. She learned to kill and to subdue, she learned to make herself the mirror point and she learned to fade into the background, she learned five languages fluently, and to understand two more ~~s~~. She learned how to stop an haemorrhage and how to provoke one, she learned forty types of blasters and rifles and how to sabotage hyperspace ship. She learned to convince and to lie and to cheat and to protect and to kill.

But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to convince her cousin to divorce Anakin quietly ~~,~~ and quickly, and it wasn’t enough to help her save Padme, when the husband she didn’t want to renounce murdered her.

When the Separatists tried to have Padme assassinated, when everything started going wrong, Sabé was deep in the Shataum sector, trying to track the money, to bring something to the Senate to stop this idiocy before the war started.

Naboo bre ~~e~~ d pacifists, but it didn't breed idiots, and nobody ever thought this crisis would stop without action.

For years, she would ask herself what would have been different, if she had gone with them, with Padme and this creepy Jedi on the lake retreat.

She came back too late. Padme and the Jedi had wed, and Sabé faded into the background every time he visited, but she never stopped watching. She didn’t like the rapport Dormé had made, about the Padawan that couldn’t stop pursuing her cousin.

But it wasn’t enough and Sabé lost Padme, lost everything and found herself seated between a little green gnarled creature with large ears and the Padawan from Naboo, now a Jedi master, and looking approximately fifty years too old.

She felt the same way.

Padme was dead, and her beloved democracy with it. In Sabé arms were two bundles, little beings part murderer and part Padmé.

That was the first of her **_NO_**.

She could understand the sad reality of their families not knowing about the twins, but separated? Raised by strangers, even well-meaning ones?

 ** _No_**. And the **_No_** was so firm and so furious that after a few hours of debate and uncompromising accusations, mostly on her part, she took a shuttle and the twins, and did as she wanted.

And also the Jedi Master that she didn’t want and didn’t need, but Yoda could be uncompromising too. The twins ~~,~~ and Kenobi, or no twins.

Do you disappear better in a remote area or in a big city? Sabé was for the second solution, and forced Obi-Wan to acquiesce, a little surprised he was so pliant under her rule. She shot down his idea of Tatooine, his second idea of Alderaan, and his third idea of Hoth, with a yell of ‘ _What is wrong with you_?’”

He accepted the capital of a little moon named Nauchis in the Anoat sector as their new place to live, a relatively recent and little known colony mostly populated with humans and Bothans. He accepted losing the beard, to disguise himself by trading the telling red of his hair for a dirty brown, he let her choose the little apartment, and their cover story. The children should be theirs, and this life a new start, far away from judgmental families because of their age difference. He bent to her will in everything, bent at every **_No_** , so much she thought for a time that it was a devious plan, a way to put her fears to sleep and then steal the children.

A strange fear, because for all her training, she knew herself no match for a Jedi, especially a Master fresh from years of war. He could have kidnapped the babies any time he wanted, so why did he let her take all the decisions, when she…Well, after ten-days she recognized in hindsight that she had chosen the neighbourhood badly: this was no place to raise children and discretion was important, but not everything, and dying of scurvy was a bad plan.

Still, he bent and let her choose everything, and when she was not busy with the twins and her planningit made her uncomfortable. Until one day she found him convulsing on the floor of the little apartment they had found.

“It’s the breaking of bonds.” He confessed quietly, after few tensemoments where she thought he would die right there, right this moment.

-“I thought you didn’t have that sort of things.”

-“It’s not attachment. Not the way you mean it. When two Force sensitive work together, learn together, know each other a long time….The breaking of the bond hurts, in the mind. You can work around one, two. But I lost a lot of them, and the one I have with Master Yoda, as two members of the Council, is not strong enough to counterbalance it.”

-“You weren’t like that after Naboo. After the Sith killed your Master in the generator complex. I would remember it, you stayed long enough for the victory celebrations.”

-“I was, but it was Jedi matter. Nobody knew but us. The Council came with a healer, Knight Bant Erin. She was one of my crèche-mate and we reinforced that bond to help me heal.”

-“Finding a Force healer from your childhood will be difficult, I prefer to tell you right now.”

-“I know. They killed everybody in the Halls of healing too.” He said softly.

He left for his room, taking three times the time he would have normally needed to cover the few meters, and she let him. She didn’t ask what she could do to help.

She wasn’t ready to forgive him for Skywalker, and he wasn’t ready to receive help.

Only time would start to heal those two facts.

And time did.

Time didand time passed, and Sabé learned to handle her rage about Padme’s fate. Time passed and the dark shadows under Obi-Wan’s eyes stopped growing because taking care of two infants dayafter day was tiring enough to force him to sleep in the night. Time passed and Luke and Leia learned to crawl, to walk, to speak, and their two caretakers suddenly understood their plans should handle things like education and a stable home, and not only fleeing from the evil Empire and murderous Sith.

“We need to move to a better place. And a job would be good too. For integrating ourselves better and the money from Organa, well, we should keep it for emergency.” Sabé decided one night, when they were carefully reviewing their budget. Obi-Wan was pretty good with numbers, something that he though was a result of too many budget meetings in the Council. He still had a closed air about him when he spoke of the Jedi, but it would probably never pass.

Sabé was beginning to avoid the subject, as a means to spare him. In the very beginning a small part of her, a part she was not very proud of, thought of their destruction as a sort of immanent justice for the death of Padme, and the Republic.

With her anger cooling, she saw him for what he was; the survivor of a genocide.

She couldn’t go back to Naboo, perhaps never, but she knew it was there.

The Jedi way of life was extinct. Centuries, thousands of years of tradition and history. By the Goddess of Naboo’s skies, she didn’t even know how long the Order had stood between the galaxy and the Sith, like a last defensive wall between the darkness and the people, and she was sharing a fresher with one of its last members!

So one day, two Nauchis’ months after they had found a new place to live, in a rural area, a small town named Reir’viop, after she had found a job as a mechanic and convinced him to become a stay-at home father, because she didn’t really trust him to not be **_weird_** in public and preferred him to avoid too many risky situations …

During their second attempt to build the children a good life, one day, she asked about the Order.

He was surprisedand told her almost nothing. The first time. And then a little more, the second. And the next. And the next. She was doing it for his sake at first, but little by little she came to find it fascinating, never having realized the mass of the culture. He talked and he talked and he talked. She learned about great masters of the past and younglings’ exercises, she learned about philosophical debates and the Agricorps, and his own past within it, and about the Seven forms of ~~l~~ lightsabers. She learned old Creche-tales, most of them terrible and were they really teaching that to children, that explained so much about his self-deprecating idiocy!

She didn’t like everything she learned and she was always honest about it.

But she learned and learned and listened, and even though she would never really understand, she wasn’t raised a Jedi, she wasn’t Force-sensitive…She would never really understand. Still, she understood _better_.

And the dark that had wanted to swallow the Jedi would have to wait a little for it because behind closed doors, a Jedi master taught their history and their lore and tried his best to pass on their wisdom. Even their poetry, terrible as it was, something that even Obi-Wan recognized.

If listening helped Sabé, because she needed to sit down for it, and to concentrate on his words and not on her anger, talking helped Obi-Wan; like some sort of balance. He, Master of the Council, told her things a Jedi would never have taught someone outside the Order before and he found comfort in it.

After a time she started telling him Naboo’s legends in return, explaining religions, history and lore.

He started a little garden, vegetables and herbs ~~,~~ to help their budget and discovered he liked that.

Five Naboo years after the death of everything they cleared the storage room in their little home, the only big room without windows and he taught her open-handed katas, all the ones she could do without the Force and that he had learned with Bant and Garen and Quinlan, all those names she now knew and mourned with him. She trained him in the Telruoc cane combat she had learned with Rabé, the Nosiol knife combat from Utapau she had learned with Eirtae and the spinning kicks that had made Yané so dangerous in hand to hand, all her past training with her sisters whose names he now mourned with her.

Sabé understood the trust had changed to friendship, to something more dangerous when the twins were seven Naboo years old, when Obi-Wan, proudly presented her with the juice of fermented berries. That was probably the strangest thing someone had offered her and the strangest in the history of wooing, but nothing could have touched her more.

He had remembered the stories she had told him, of the Naboo Sullicab, the little orange berries typical from the lake countries that her people traditionally conserved with lactic acid fermentation for the little sourish taste it gave them, the berries they had put in cakes in the winter months. He had remembered she'd liked to drink the leftover juice when her father had taken the berries from the jar and he had experimented in secret with local berries to create something for her.

He probably didn’t even recognize that it was almost a declaration of love. For all his progress, he had the emotional awareness of a bantha, the dear man. In the quiet of her mind she recognized that she wouldn’t be opposed to him realizing that they could do more than live together, raising the twins and pretending to be lovers. That they could find more.

 _Oh Padme, what I am supposed to do? Loving a Jedi is stupid. It killed you, and the galaxy_.

Sabé was nothing but courage, in a little brunette package. Two days after, she let the kids spend the night at some of their friends’ house, profusely thanked the parents, and cornered Obi-Wan. The Jedi Master promptly panicked, sputtered and became as red as the remembrance scar in the traditional Naboo garb.

-“This is not a trick. This is not a trap. Please, breathe and take a sip of water.”

By the Goddess, she loved the man but he was ridiculous.

And she was apparently finding that attractive, if it wasn’t a sign her reason had left the port…

-“You’ll always be the Force’s husband, I have no problems with that.”

-“It doesn’t work like that and you know it very well.”

-“You can have all the time you need to meditate on it. I have no intention to pressure you.”

-“Could you please stop sounding as if I was a fair maiden in a stupid holodrama?”

-“Well, aren’t you a virgin?”

-“I still don’t understand the fascination with virginity from people.”

-“We weren’t all raised in a culture where this was the norm. I knew some of yours took vows. I have no intentions to take that from you if you want to keep them. I respect the Jedi way.”

-“Less than two days ago you said that the Ruussan Reformation was a bunch of nonsense. “

-“Well, it was. You became Senate hounds. But even if I can’t understand everything in the Jedi way, I can respect that your choices are yours only. I think we could be good together, but you've lost enough, if you want to keep your vows, it would be alright. You can recognize we would be good together but prefer to keep your vows, you can not be interested, and you can need time…”

-“I didn’t. The vows, I never took them. It… Just before I was supposed to take them, I met someone, I questioned my path…well, she’s dead, and I never told her, so I prefer to keep her name for me. But my Master told me I should take more time before I took the vows, to be sure, and then…”

-“And then he died, and you were knighted.”

-“Yes. I respected the chastity vows but I never took them. And yes, we would be good together. We already are. Can I have a little time? And perhaps, you should take that time, too. If it doesn’t work between us, it would be awkward.”

She left him alone to think.

 _Was it like that, Padmé? Did you feel that way? I was so furious, I never asked you. Please, tell me you took time to think_.

Would it be worth it? Could they risk their peace, the trust and the friendship and the good life they gave the twins, just because she wanted to know the sensation of his hair under her hand, just because she wanted to taste his lips, and to teach him how to receive pleasure, how to give it? Just because she wanted a way to acknowledge the importance he took in her life?

Ten days after that, late at night, for the first time he followed her into her bedroom, blushing, hesitant. She touched his jaw, searching for consent in his eyes.

-“It’s not too late. You can always go back to your rooms.”

-“It’s already too late. The vow of chastity, it’s about realizing nothing is more important than the Order and the Force and that flesh is nothing. But I desire you. And I love you. Would you have me, as I am, a learner in love as I am in the Force?”

She kissed him and all was said. He was quiet at first, only following her advices, her demands but soon he revealed himself an eager pupil, and a good student. She hadn’t realized how much she missed sex. Almost eight years because she had been too busy at the end of the war. She hadn’t realized how she missed the weight of another body on the bed, the feel of want, the plethora of emotions, the laughs and the trust.

She hadn’t realized how much better it would be, once he found his footing, with someone she was already so close to. Perhaps even closer than she was with Padmé. ~~~~

They busied themselves in pleasure, so much that six Naboo months after their beginning as lovers, when she was late for the first time in years, she needed almost one Naboo month to notice. She had always be careful, purchasing contraception was the first thing she did when she understood desire had bloomed between them.

 _Before_ talking to Obi-Wan.

She waited three more days before searching for medical advice.

Pregnant.

Pregnant.

_Was it how you felt? Padme, Padme, what am I supposed to do?_

She thought of terminating it. Without telling him. But that child. A child of his body and hers, a defiance, a call to life in the shadow of the Empire. A mistake, yes, but a mistake with an attitude, a yell of rebellion.

The child of a handmaiden and a Jedi, in a world without a place for either. Probably Force-Sensitive.

She went home, and she told him.

The child was born in a dark night, a difficult birth, because when things were ever easy for them? A little girl that the doctors needed to take from her body with a C-section, because of an old blaster wound.

A little girl with a new name. Not Padmé, not Siri, not Dormé, not Bant.

Roya. A name of that world where they had found each other, where they had learned each other. A name without past.

She had his hair and her eyes, her lips and his nose, strong lungs and a little birthmark on her right foot.

And she was Force-sensitive, like her father. For the first time, Sabé took back one of her “ _No”_ , and let Obi-Wan teach the twins, and later Roya. He trained them in the Jedi arts and she trained them as she would have trained handmaidens if the world had continued normally, had she taken Panaka’s place, as was planned.

Leia was the most deadly little predator with a knife, but it was Luke who was the most fascinated by Naboo traditions.

She had birthed a Jedi. She was raising three Jedi. She loved a Jedi. For all their mistakes, the Jedi were a force of good and peace and it was time she accepted it. Anakin Skywalker was an aberration in the Jedi history and poor Padme had paid the price for that.

Years after, when the Emperor had been dead for months because he had underestimated love, when Coruscant was freshly taken by the New Republic, Sabé went back to Naboo.

She was supposed to go alone, but when Obi-Wan and their children had learned about her journey, she'd found them on the ramp of the ship. Obi-Wan was even wearing his arm prosthesis, something he had stopped doing after the deaths of Darth Sidious and his ex-Padawan.

-“My war is finally finished.” He had said to her. “And I don’t need it anymore.” But today he was wearing it.

-“You’re bringing home an older man after twenty-five years of absence. No need for your family to immediately know I’m crippled, too.”

-“You lost that arm giving us time to escape the Death Star. I’m very lucky, because I could have lost you that day. I don’t care about the arm, wear the prosthesis or not, and they will think the same thing. I’m not ashamed of you, just like I’m not ashamed of Leia’s hand, because it’s the sign of her courage on Bespin.”

Sabé put her head on Obi-Wan’s shoulder for a heartbeat and looked at their three children, chatting and excited to meet her family, her parents, her brother, and Padme’s parents and sister. She was feeling pretty good, exertion from the war aside, and extremely proud.

-“I was thinking of the school.” Obi-Wan said quietly.

-“Yes?”

She had raised three Jedi and she loved another, but she still remembered all the terrible concepts that were normal in Jedi training, and that she had made him leave out of their children lessons.

-“The Jedi should have left Coruscant eons ago. We were too close to political power. And your teachings have made me a better tactician, a better Jedi, a better person.”

-“ Tell that to the goons spying for the Alliance, general Kenobi. They detest me.”

-“Only because you like to prove to them that you’re always three steps ahead of them, dear one. After almost twenty years in exile, you’re always better informed and that vex them. But I didn’t want to speak of them. I will open an Academy, but not on Coruscant. I have a meeting with the Queen in five days, on Naboo.”

-“You want to open it on _Naboo_.”

-“Yes. And I want you to teach in it. I want non-Force-sensitive teachers, and Force-sensitive teachers. I want Force-sensitive students, and non-Force-sensitive too. There is more to the Jedi than the ability to have visions of the future and to make jumps that the laws of physics should forbid. We will train Knights and Healers and Handmaidens and Explorers and I don’t know how much more. People wanting to follow the Light and to protect life and democracy.”

She couldn't find her voice anymore. She thought of the broken man she had taken to Nauchis twenty-five years ago, the man that didn’t know how to function outside the strict rules of the Order, and how now he was ready to build something new.

“Yes.” She said, and then she took his hand. The hair on it were white now and there was more grey than anything else in her hair too, but she was ready for new challenges. And for one last step ~~s~~ he had never forgiven Padme ~~,~~ until now.

Yes, it was time.

-“Those are wonderful plans, my dear General Kenobi. But before that, I have a plan, too. I think I should make an honest Jedi Master of you.” And she kissed his words of surprise and joy right off his lips.

 

_And they lived happily after!_

 


End file.
